Clever new Geometric Music app lets you make music with shapes

This seems like something that could be fun for kids but that’s also riiiight around my level of musical ability. A new app, Geometric Music, allows you to lay down your own beats – no matter how bad you are at making music (or doing maths).

Use it to record any noise, from singing to clapping to actual music if, unlike me, you actually have a shred of talent in that area, and then allocate it a shape depending on how many times you want it to repeat: a circle means you’ll hear it once, a triangle three times, a square four, and hexagon six. You can layer different sounds and make the shapes bigger or smaller to make them slower or faster and move them up or down the screen to alter their volume.

It was created by Gaëtan Libertiaux and Gaël Bertrand from the Belgian creative design studio Superbe and, to be fair, it’s probably not going to turn you into the new Taylor Swift: it’s designed for fun rather than for actual serious composition. Or as Libertiaux told Wired, ‘We don’t really care about the technical vision itself or about creating the most efficient tool.’

In line with the fun, ephemeral nature of its intentions, you can’t yet save what you’ve made in the app: like a musical Etch-a-Sketch, once you start a new ‘song’, the old one is deleted. But the designers plan to fix that in the next version, allowing you to send that track of your baby giggling with a background of you beatboxing to all of your relatives. Or Sony.

It’s free for iOS, Android, and desktop and you can sample it via the website.

Staff Writer Diane is especially interested in high-tech medical advances, weird and interesting uses of science, new gadgets, and the intersection of tech and lifestyle. When not working, she reads the internet, listens to podcasts, watches American TV, and thinks about leaving the house.